MONTREAL—When Quebec City was turned into a battleground during the 2001 Summit of the Americas, those fighting against globalization called in Denis Poitras after they’d been arrested by the police.

In the nightly preparations for the Quebec tuition protests of 2012, better known as the Maple Spring, students and activists wrote the 59-year-old lawyer’s telephone number on their forearm in case of arrest. Poitras’s phone rang off the hook.

And when a 20-year-old student was charged with criminal harassment earlier this year for allegedly posting a photo of a painting of a Montreal police spokesman with a bullet in his forehead, it was Poitras who has standing by her side.

Most of the cases he has taken on have been pro bono. And now, the workaholic lawyer has declared bankruptcy, causing him to lose his licence and abandon a staggering 1,700 active court files that had packed his agenda all the way through to February 2015.

Those clients are now without the man they have come to trust and rely on when their fight against alleged police brutality, neo-liberalism, globalization or other forms of perceived state tyranny go to court. A fellow lawyer Étienne Poitras (no relation) has taken on most of the load for now.

Poitras’s problems have never been a shortage of clients but, rather, a shortage of clients who could pay for his services. He has never seen that as a good enough reason for him to turn them away.

“I’ve always said that my best payment was to work with those people,” he said in an interview. “It gives value to what you do.”

But Poitras is now in the lurch. He hasn’t paid taxes in years and the missed payments, along with penalties and interest, has reached $287,000.

As he tries to negotiate a repayment scheme with federal and provincial tax authorities and regain his legal licence from the Quebec Bar Association, a campaign has emerged asking that the thousands of strangers who have relied on the kindness of the Montreal lawyer to now step forward with whatever financial assistance they can afford.

His job is to get his affairs in order and get out the message that he is in need of help.

“There are lawyers who get caught for fraud, for this and for that . . . but that’s not my case. Even if I haven’t paid the GST or the provincial sales tax, it’s not money that I’ve used to buy a villa in Panama,” he said.

The largest and most radical of the province’s student associations said it has provided some money from a legal defence fund remaining from the Maple Spring to help Poitras. It is also handling parts of the fundraising campaign.

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the student leader who became one of the faces of the student strikes, has donated and urged others to do the same. So has provincial politician Amir Khadir of Québec Solidaire, whose daughter was arrested and charged with setting off a smoke bomb at a subway station in the heady days of the student protests.

Nearly $28,000 had been raised by Thursday afternoon, and every morning cheques arrive. Some are for as little as a few dollars. Some are from sympathetic and tenured university types.

One cheque was from a priest in Trois-Rivières. One person offered the services of a local accountant for one year. A local bike shop offered free repairs (Poitras lives above his office and doesn’t own a car). One woman offered him a room in her house if he needed it. A lawyer friend took one week of unpaid leave to help him sort through the papers, forms, bills and unfinished spreadsheets that have been ignored for too long.

Poitras admits to irresponsible bookkeeping and says that he will spend the next two weeks making outstanding claims for payment under legal aid, which he values at about $40,000.

The unpaid claims, the unfiled taxes, a life lived with an empty wallet have been nagging problems for Poitras for years. But he says the financial problems also held him back, preventing him from venturing into politics, which might have been a natural outlet for someone whose life’s work involves challenging laws he sees as unjust.

“I always knew that my tax problems would catch up to me so I never attempted to get involved,” he said.

Poitras also blames a legal system that has morphed over the years to make it more difficult to launch a court challenge. Where those arrested in protests and demonstrations were once granted access to legal aid to mount a defence, authorities are now increasingly issuing tickets for breaches of the law, he said.

While such methods might be expected to place a lesser burden on the courts, they also deny the alleged lawbreaker access to legal aid money. Poitras estimates that 80 per cent of his caseload involves people who have been issued tickets — many of them young, many of them cash-strapped, most of them unable to pay the lawyers’ fees.

If he does manage to pay off his debts and regain his law practice, he has already been told that one of the conditions is that he hire a secretary who can bring order to the business. He’ll also have to push a bit harder for payment from clients, and he knows that this could affect the cases he is able to take on.

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